Day in Engineering History Archive - August 11

August 11

The
Dog Days of Summer
end. 1896: The first electric light bulb socket featuring an on-and-off pull chain was patented
by Harvey Hubbell. 1909: The
liner Arapahoe was the first ship to use the radio distress call,
SOS (save
our ship, Morse Code ···---···).
1919: Industrialist Andrew Carnegie died. 1921:
Tom Kilburn, who
was the first to succeed in storing and then retrieving a bit of data via software, was born.
1934: A load of America's most dangerous prisoners became the first inmates on
Alcatraz Island. 1942: Actress
Hedy Markey
(Lamarr) received a patent for a secret communication system. 1951:
WCBS-TV in New York City televised the first
baseball doubleheader (in color) between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves. 1962:
The Soviet Union launched cosmonaut
Andrian Nikolayev
on a 94-hour flight. 1977:
Sir Frederic
Williams, co-inventor of the CRT (the "Williams tube"), died. 1984: President Ronald Reagan
joked during a voice test for a
radio
address that he had "signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing
in five minutes." 1992: The Mall of America opened in Minneapolis as the largest shopping mall in the
United States. 1997: President Clinton made the first the use of the
line-item veto approved
by Congress. 1999: The last
total solar
eclipse of the millennium occurred.

Note: These
historical tidbits have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet.
As detailed in this article, there
is a lot of wrong information that is repeated hundreds of times because most websites
do not validate with authoritative sources. On RF Cafe, events with
hyperlinks have been verified. Many years ago,
I began commemorating the birthdays of notable people and events with
special RF Cafe logos.
Where available, I like to use images from postage stamps from the country where
the person or event occurred.

RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB.
Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference
material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The Internet
was still largely an unknown entity at the time and not much was available in the form of
WYSIWYG ...

All trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other rights of ownership to images and text used
on the RF Cafe website are hereby acknowledged.